One of the greatest threats to mankind today is that the world may be choked by an explosively pervading but well camouflaged bureaucracy.
Interpretation
Bureaucracy can stifle progress and suffocate innovation if left unchecked.
Norman Borlaug's quote highlights the dangers of pervasive bureaucracy in society, suggesting that it can become an insidious force that hampers human advancement and creativity. The 'well camouflaged' nature of this bureaucracy implies that people may not even recognize the ways it can constrain freedom and effectiveness, leading to stagnation in various sectors.
In practice
In a speech on the importance of innovation in business, this quote serves as a warning against excessive bureaucracy.
During the past three years spectacular progress has been made in increasing wheat, rice, and maize production in several of the most populous developing countries of southern Asia, where widespread famine appeared inevitable only five years ago
We must recognize the fact that adequate food is only the first requisite for life. For a decent and humane life, we must also provide an opportunity for good education, remunerative employment, comfortable housing, good clothing, and effective and compassionate medical care.
We are 6.6 billion people now. We can only feed 4 billion. I don't see 2 billion volunteers to disappear.
Nevertheless, the number of farmers, small as well as large, who are adopting the new seeds and new technology is increasing very rapidly, and the increase in numbers during the past three years has been phenomenal.
Africa needs roads. Roads bring know-how and fertilizer to farmers and ideas and business for commerce.
This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people. Without fertilizer, forget it. The game is over.
I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.
I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.
Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind.
If one rejects laissez faire on account of mans fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.
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